When you look at your next career adventure you may think about the opportunity, title, promotion, benefits, and culture. Or simply having a job. Hot meals for lunch? Fireball allowed on your desktop? No dress code? Ping pong table? Bring your 4-legged companion named Rover to work? Remote working? Stock options?
Discussing blog topics with my husband, he advised promoting companies offering pensions as a tool for your retirement strategy. Have you thought about your long term needs for retirement? Maybe not. My career with Fortune 200 companies allowed me to retire early with a 401K, retiree healthcare, and pension to fund the latter.
What’s A Pension?
According to The Balance: “A pension is a type of retirement plan that provides monthly income in retirement. Not all employers offer pensions. Government organizations usually offer a pension, and some large companies offer them. With a pension plan, the employer contributes money to the pension plan while you are working. The money will be paid to you, usually as a monthly check in retirement, after you reach a specific retirement age.” Employee benefits firm Willis Towers Watson noted within the past 17 years companies offering traditional pension plans to new hires fell from 50% to 5%. The great news, there are still companies offering them. Think about a 5-year career investment yielding a retirement benefit to you in your 50’s or you can hold out longer — similar to Social Security — for an increased monthly stipend.
The pension won’t even go away if the company goes bankrupt and out of business. Did you know the U.S. government has an agency handling pension insurance with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation? According to their website they “protect the retirement security of nearly 37 million Americans in single employer and multiemployer pension plans. Our goal is to provide the highest-level of customer support, and to work to protect workers’ and retirees’ hard-earned pension benefits.” Pretty cool.
While your pension isn’t at risk your retiree corporate healthcare can cease to exist.The former happened to my husband and I as former Nortel Networks employees losing healthcare benefits but we both still have pensions from working there. Based upon our work history we’ve managed to accrue pensions from CenturyLink, Corning, and GE which supplement a monthly family operating budget for healthcare and a global traveling lifestyle.
Corporations Still Offering Pensions
If you are a tech person, I strongly urge you to check out the following companies offering pensions since it will help you in retirement even if it isn’t as intriguing as working for AWS, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Future ROI in my opinion can be as important as resumé building with hot tech companies. You can still join one of them later. The following companies offer fully funded pensions for new hires by tenure ranging from 2-5 years noted below if publicly disclosed.
- Coca-Cola (Atlanta): 2 years
- Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick): 5 years
- ExxonMobil (Irving): 5 years
- JPMorgan Chase (NYC): 3 years
- Prudential (Newark)
- Merck (Kenilworth): 5 years
- Eli Lilly & Co. (Indianapolis)
- Aflac (Columbus)
- BB&T (Winston-Salem): 5 years
- PG&E (San Francisco): 5 years
- NextEra Energy (Juno Beach): 3 years
- JM Family Enterprise (Deerfield Beach)
- NuStar Energy (San Antonio)
Perhaps the above companies are geographically undesirable, don’t meet your personal mission or technical background. But if they do, they are worth pursuing as part of your long-term career adventure. Land your dream job, you deserve it!
